


Mischief Makers

by sihaya13



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 03:44:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7298113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sihaya13/pseuds/sihaya13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>George learns to make mischief alone</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mischief Makers

It was three years to the day that George Weasley decided that he had moped for long enough. He was at little Victoire’s birthday, and he heard Bill and Fleur talking, using that phrase they always used.

“You became twice as beautiful after the war, my love. To make up for this horrid, scarred face.”

“I love your ‘orrid, scarred face,” she replied, kissing it.

George’s first thought was gross. His second thought? That there could be a lesson in this.

The world worked as a set of balancing scales, as gives and takes, yins and yangs.

Without Fred, the world was out of balance. But he could fix that.

The next time Bill visited him in his shop, he told him so.

“I’m going to be twice as, well, twice as everything. For Fred.”

Bill smiled sadly, “I think he’d like that.”

Three seconds later his hair had grown down past his knees.

“Fred! George!” he yelled, out of instinct.

He and George both paused for a moment, tears in their eyes. Then they howled with laughter, and it was as if Fred were there, laughing along with them.

First on his list of things to do: revitalise the shop. It had languished as he had languished. Even with Ron there the past year, it didn’t have that famous Fred and George sparkle it had been known for before the war. George could fix that too.

He skipped into the shop the next morning whistling, grinning as Ron looked at him with a pleasantly bewildered expression adorning his face.

“Morning, little brother.”

“Morning,” Ron grinned at him. The grin quickly became more of a grimace as he realised his ears and nose had both sprouted rather sizable tufts of bright red hair.

“What kind of joke shop are we if we don’t play jokes on our employees?” George asked, batting his eyelashes innocently.

Ron rolled his eyes, smiling. As soon as George turned his back to head to the design room he realised he was dragging a few extra limbs along with the rest of his person. Limbs that upon closer inspection greatly resembled the tentacles of the giant squid. He threw his head back and laughed, continuing on to the design room where, upon removing his newly acquired appendages, he set to work.

It was that day, his first day back at work when he felt cheerful, when he felt like the shop meant something again, when he felt like life meant something again, that he ran into Angelina Johnson as he was getting coffee. He was sure that it was part of the shifting of the scales, it was the universe sending him a sign that he was doing the right thing. That not only could he live without Fred, he could thrive. He would take all the pain and all the sadness, and he would let it out occasionally, but mostly he would use it to create happiness. His own, his wife’s, his children’s, his family’s, his customers, strangers in the street. He would not let Fred dying take anything else from the world and the people that had suffered so much already.

Several years later he would sit his children down after dinner and tell them about their Uncle Fred. He would tell them all the things that made him marvellous, and tell them stories about all of their best pranks together. And he would tell them not to be too sad that they didn’t get to meet their Uncle Fred, because his spirit lived on in him, their father, and in their grandmother Molly, and in their Uncle Ron, and in all of the people who had known him and loved him and passed that love and knowledge onto others. And it lived on in them, too, in his little Fred and his little Roxanne.

But, because they didn’t get to meet their Uncle Fred, a person who had made everyone smile and laugh and who had made the world a better place, they would have to do all these things for him. They were part of the balancing scales.

So when, in her very first year, Roxanne sent him home a toilet seat in the mail, he cried, and he laughed, and he sent her a letter:

_Congratulations, my little mischief maker._


End file.
